Tuesday, May 27, 2014

I've written several times this spring about old employee photo I.D. badges. Now PermaRec reader Kirsten Hively has found one of those badges in an unusual place: the familiar "Rosie the Riveter" poster, shown above.

See that little pin on Rosie's collar? Looks like an employee I.D. badge, right? I've looked at that illustration a gazillion times but had never noticed the badge until Kirsten pointed it out to me the other day. Let's take a closer look at it:

It's a Westinghouse Electric employee I.D. badge! That makes sense, because the Rosie illustration was commissioned by Westinghouse's War Production Coordinating Committee, which was looking to inspire the company's female workforce. You can learn more about that here and here. (Those links also explain why the it's actually a misnomer to refer to the poster as "Rosie the Riveter," but I'm going to keep calling it that for now, because it's a convenient, easily understood shorthand.)

And here's someone who flopped the original orientation of the Rosie image and then Photoshopped her own face onto it, apparently not realizing (or caring) that the "Westinghouse Electric" lettering on the original badge would appear backwards on her flopped version.

Did Westinghouse Electric really have badges like the one shown in the illustration? They sure did. Not only that, but some enterprising soul on Etsy has used that badge design as the basis for a replica Rosie I.D. badge. (They also offer the same design as a zipper pull, but come on — that's cheating.)

Sorry, I left out the link, and thus deleted the original. I was going to say that I think you'd enjoy this short documentary from the Library of Congress about Rosie. If I remember it correctly, they historian even points out the badge. Very interesting stuff.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04VNBM1PqR8

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Permanent Record, an object-based history project by journalist Paul Lukas, began as an investigation into the stories emerging from a bunch of old report cards found in a discarded file cabinet. The report cards are still the core of the project, but Permanent Record has expanded to include examination of other found objects, including postcards, business records, photographs, things left inside of old books, messages in bottles, and so on. Basically, if it's an old object, seems to have an evocative story to tell, and has been orphaned, lost, or otherwise isolated outside its natural habitat, Permanent Record is interested in it.

You can learn more about Permanent Record here. To contact Paul Lukas, or to be added to the PermaRec mailing list, please click here.

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